Love is my religion — I could die for that — I could die for you. My creed is Love, and you are its only tenet — You have ravish'd me away by a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often "to reason against the reasons of my Love." I can do that no more — the pain would be too great — My Love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.

JOHN KEATS, Love letter to Fanny Brawne

The existence of God and the existence of Man. One of these is a mistake. Take your pick. It doesn't matter. Anya Sharma has always lost the coin toss against fate, she will keep doing so. Because what is a girl half human and half god, anyway? If not the serrated sorrow of her mother. If not the haunting absence of her father. Anya was born out of light, pure divine light, daughter of the sun god Surya and a human, a mere human. 

Pink fleshed and crying, Kriti Sharma always said that her daughter was perfect. But Anya knows that things that are perfect things are dead things. Empty things. Graveyard silence and mourning cicadas. Anya is an impossible thing made of iron and water. She is flesh and blood and bone, and the light of ten thousand suns. She is a dream with teeth. Too good for perfection. Most of the time, Anya feels shapeless. It is an odd feeling. But it's hard for her to tell apart the sadness of the world from the sadness of her self. She feels as if she is floating in an endless void, with no sign of land or rescue. As she sinks further and further down, she finds that the dark gets darker and it's not really black so much as the last degree of reds. The secret blood of reds. And there's a dark so deep beneath the sea that the creatures beget their own light. This feat, this fact of adaption is beautiful, though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish. Anya, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden by eternal darkness.

She turns thirteen and the bruises start blooming like tender flowers on her skin. Blue, black and yellow. Patterns peppered like intricate flesh tattoos. Hidden from her mother under draping fabrics, these bruises mark her, showcasing the enormity of her suffering. But this suffering is private, and it tastes like blood and wine. Suffering feels religious if you do it right. And nobody is better at suffering than Anya Sharma. At least that's what she thinks. Sneaking around the streets of Brooklyn in the dead of night to impart her justice upon the world seems like the best way of payback. An eye for an eye. It is extremely difficult for Anya to forgive the universe for its carelessness with her. She doesn't know if forgiving exists, or if there even is such a thing as forgiving. So why does she traverse the night, rooftop to rooftop? Why does she get into fights? Why does she like the wounds that make her weep? She needs to gamble with fire, with blood, with mourning, not because she is a gambler but because she needs to almost die.

Because almost dead is when her father feels the closest. Because almost dead is excruciatingly painful and so much better than that nothing. That thorough empty nothing. That nothing that spreads and it spreads everywhere in her until she can't feel anything anymore and she is just this dark empty black hole. Almost dead is so much better than this nothing.

Dean Alfaro was two months old when his mother died in a bomb blast. He swears he can still feel her warmth beside his bed sometimes. He never got to call her mother, and that is one of the things that always weighs on his shoulders. Camile Alfaro's old colleague and friend adopted Dean because he needed a mother and a father, and Laura and Clint needed a son. He is their son, but he has his mother's disposition. As he grows older, he prefers to play with Clint's weapons laying about rather than the figurines he's bought him. It scares Clint sometimes, terrifies him. He remembers one such incident when he'd found twelve-year-old Dean in the garage with a long bloody gash along his arm, the hidden weapons safe wide open behind him. They had scolded him, grounded him. But fear never seemed to have the same effect on Dean. He would just want to do the terrifying and forbidden thing even more. So Clint made a compromise because he was good at compromises. He would teach Dean. This way he could control what he learned and how he learned it. This way he could keep an eye on him. This way he wouldn't lose another child.

Dean never felt out of place with the Bartons, even after the kids arrived. One by one, he had three younger siblings and Nate was his favorite, but Lila and Cooper came a close second. He can't remember all the times he has cried but he does remember two instances. When he had seen little baby boy Nate for the very first time in the children's ward in the hospital. Clint observing Dean's face, his nose pressed against the glass. He didn't know why he had cried. The tears had escaped without consent. To this day, he still doesn't know why he cried.

The next time, it was around a week ago. Dean was laying on his bed, after being grounded again for coming back late from school with bruises all over him. Nate was laying on top of him on his stomach, babbling on and he had suddenly gone quiet. Dean had looked down at him and Nate had touched his cheek and quietly said, "Boo." What he had meant to say was that Dean was hurt. Which he was, a scratch ran down the length of his cheek. Nate had made him cry again that day.

He doesn't know why he does it, though. Fight. Maybe he is looking for someone to come stop him. Or maybe he is finding someone else in these fights. They just feel like a declaration. And Dean loves declarations. But what is it a declaration of? Love? Love wants witnesses - it feeds on witnesses. Love stages a scene and love happens in two's: the ones who love and the others. Dean is like a bad wolf who only knows it is being loved when it is kicked. But Dean can't help it. It is who he is. When people are frightened, his first instinct is always to frighten them more. And he keeps howling, Dean keeps howling to prove something. It's just he doesn't know yet what he's trying to prove.

Alia Bhatt as . . . .
ANYA SHARMA

LUMEN / LADY OF LIGHT

Brooklyn's too cold tonight &
all my friends are three years away.

Froy Gutierrez as . . . .
DEAN ALFARO BARTON

ARSENAL

I have no other homeland but you.

with . . . .

KATE BISHOP
HAWKEYE

Does your mother love you all the time? Have you ever doubted?

PETER PARKER
SPIDER-MAN

Name one hero who was happy.

ANYA'S THEME ────────
CHINESE SATELLITE by Phoebe Bridgers

DEAN'S THEME ────────
MOON SONG by Phoebe Bridgers

CLINT BARTON / HAWKEYE

SCARLET WITCH / WANDA MAXIMOFF

STEPHEN STRANGE / DOCTOR STRANGE

MS. AMERICA / AMERICA CHAVEZ

SCOTT LANG / ANTMAN

HULK / BRUCE BANNER

MATT MURDOCK / DAREDEVIL

KINGPIN / WILSON FISK

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

i think the picture's enough explanation.

Content Warning: Canon typical violence, character death, graphic description of death, blood, injury, murder, crime, suicide attempts, child abuse/neglect (referenced or otherwise), mental illness, alcohol-abuse, religious conflict, nightmares, and terrible family dynamics.

Dedications: heIIborn pulcherrius CXPTAINSYNDULLA elfaouly queens-hope artcinemas -lxcifer 

☀️ This is the result of wanting to make an oc to integrate into Multiverse of Madness. Anya feels a lot of inner turmoil from the fact that her father is a god, and also that he abandoned her. She feels that if she wasn't good enough for god, who's supposed to love everyone, then how can she be good enough for anyone else. She does get bullied at school sometimes and generally feels rejected. She prefers solitary, but also craves love, respect and attention. While she was growing up, her mother let her know that her father was the sun god and that he left. This knowledge affected Anya, she feels ashamed that she was abandoned, and this frames her sense of self-identity throughout the story.

☀️ Dean Alfaro is my baby boy. He loves his dead mother, but that love will only bring him heartbreak in the future. Clint and Laura being parents! He is also a very looking-for-trouble kind of guy, but most of the time trouble usually finds him. He goes through some horrible things in the story so bear with him he makes some choices that are like very bad.

☀️ Anya and Dean story will be slowly paced, and I still haven't fully plotted it out, so bear with me. But they'll be cute, though. Religiously conflicted girlfriend, who's only religion now is her love and only god is her lover. And the boyfriend, lonely and alone is all sense of the words, but -- finding his homeland in the girl. :(